At least eight dead, 100 injured in German train crash: police

MUNICH: Two commuter trains collided head-on in southern Germany on Tuesday, killing at least eight people and injuring around 100, in one of the country’s deadliest rail accidents in years.

Hundreds of rescuers were racing to pull passengers from the wreckage in a wooded area near Bad Aibling, a spa town about 60 kilometres (40 miles) southeast of Munich.

Several carriages were overturned.

“We have eight dead on the trains,” said police spokesman Juergen Thaimeier, adding that about 100 people had been injured, 55 of them seriously.

Local police spokesman Martin Winkler had earlier given a toll of four dead.

But rescuers subsequently found another four bodies in the train wreckage.

The “tragic accident occurred on the single-track route between Rosenheim and Holzkirchen this morning shortly after 7:00 am (0600 GMT),” regional rail company Meridian, a subsidiary of the French group Transdev, said in a statement.

The cause of the accident was not immediately clear.

Rainer Scharf, a police officer from the southern state of Bavaria, said that “given the severity of the accident, we believe the two regional trains collided head-on at a low speed.”

He added that the priority was to “rescue the many injured”.

The police tweeted that several hundred emergency services workers were on the scene in the rural area.